The Democrats Gloat Thread

dlowan wrote:

You say the governator is not yours, yet you wear his image....your equivocations are wearisome, but perhaps are your job?

Your image is a smoking rabbit. What do you think that says about you?

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When I say I am prepared to defend the actions of those who lie when being improperly questioned, you decide defend means approve.

VERY odd for a lawyer, I would have thought.

I've been waiting for you to address my question for several posts now. You have chosen to wait until now to attempt a full answer -- and you have provided a very strained and waffling one. I'd say it was "odd" for a social worker -- or whatever the hell you do for a living -- but it probably isn't.

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As for Bush's crimes.......yes, I do think he and his cronies lied about the intelligence. It will be interesting to see whether this gets to the point of criminal investigation or not. My hunch would be not, as others are likely to take the fall, if there is one. The "wild claims" made re there being no WMD, re frequent abuse in US prison facilities, re who was behind the Plame outing are not looking so very wild right now, are they? Yet I, and others, have been systematucally attacked by the right for daring to say anything about any of these things over the past couple of years. I am willing to trust my judgment on these things better than I will trust the right's.

You and the rest of the anti-war fringe have been accusing Bush of lying for years with no substantiation, other than your "feelings." The moniker "looney left" is well-deserved.

Local election news filled this morning with Dems making sweeps all the way down to school boards!!!!


Yea!!!!

Your insult re professions is silly. As a lawyer you, or your criminal bar colleagues, constantly defend people guilty of crimes. The fact that they are guilty does not, as far as I know, rob them of the right to a defence, (although I gather that, ethically and legally speaking, your lot are not supposed to tell actual lies that they know to be such in defending them, a stricture I observe to be dishonoured frequently, but I digress).

I actually speak more ethically than narrowly legally, nonetheless I find your apparent faulire to grasp this simple legal concept strange.

As a non lawyer, I do not speak in strictly legal terms anyway. To help your comprehension, here is a simple example: I often defend people being condemned globally for particular actions when they are being denigrated in normal social chats, or here. I have even defended Bush, on occasion, when I think he has been wrongly accused. This does not mean I approve of most of his presidential actions. I really do not see what is so hard for you to grasp, or so woolly, but there we go.

The "republican" mayor of New York City is not really a republican. He is a life long democrat who switched parties to increase his chances of winning his first term election in 2001.

Michael Bloomberg is the founder of Bloomberg LP, a news and financial-information services company. A long-time Democrat, he switched parties in 2001 to run in the less-crowded Republican field, but his views stayed along more liberal lines, an asset in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one.

BBB

I do not know how to clarify such a simple concept further, Tico.

I know you are trying to argue and twist teeny little points, presumably cos it makes you feel good, or some such, because this sophistical picking apart of things is your standard ploy, but I actually truly cannot make it simpler.

This is a totally simple, normal everyday thing. Have you never, when someone is attacked, said, "Well, that might be true, but we need to consider this, or that, your attack is not completely fair given the circumstances."

This is the simple human point. By all means try to dance upon the head of a pin, but I do not intend to count your angels. I don't even believe in them. If you cannot grasp what I am saying, I can't help you. I do not believe that you don't. You are, I believe, posturing. Anyone can grasp this concept. It is something most of us do often.

When it comes to the legal side discussion, I assume you normally understand legal points, but you seem to be pretending not to grasp this one.

Do lawyers defend guilty people or not?

When they do so, what do they do?

As for the proessional insult, this one seems to be relevant. You are behaving like a lawyer.

... you even used the absurd pompous language of a cross examination.

old europe wrote:

This is really something I don't understand. We had a thread about that with lots of information and sources on this topic. I'll post a bit here:

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In late 2002, two Afghans were detained at Bagram, the main U.S. base in Afghanistan.

The detainees were a 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar and a 30-year-old named Mullah Habibullah. They were chained to the ceiling in standing positions.

Over a five-day period, these two men were repeatedly beaten and died slow, excruciating deaths. An autopsy performed on Dilawar showed that his legs were destroyed and that amputation would have been necessary. Habibullah died of a pulmonary embolism caused by blood clots formed in the legs from the beatings.

Of the 28 U.S. soldiers facing possible charges for the two murders, only four were punished.

One soldier has been sentenced to two months in prison, another to three months. A third was demoted and given a letter of reprimand and a fine. A fourth was given a reduction in rank and pay.

I might add that the soldiers at Bagram believed at least one of their prisoners - the taxi driver - to be a completely innocent civilian.

Is it possible that this incident was exaggerated, embellished, or fabricated? When Lyndie England and others have incurred much stiffer penalities for inflicting much lesser damage on prisoners at Abu Graib, it is difficult for me to believe the sentence would have been more lenient in the incident you cited. So are you absolutely confident of your source? You can say without qualification that you know it to be true as reported?

School Board
Evolution Slate Outpolls Rivals

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

Among the losing incumbents on the Dover, Pa., board were two members who testified in favor of the intelligent design policy at a recently concluded federal trial on the Dover policy: the chairwoman, Sheila Harkins, and Alan Bonsell.

The election results were a repudiation of the first school district in the nation to order the introduction of intelligent design in a science class curriculum. The policy was the subject of a trial in Federal District Court that ended last Friday. A verdict by Judge John E. Jones III is expected by early January.

"I think voters were tired of the trial, they were tired of intelligent design, they were tired of everything that this school board brought about," said Bernadette Reinking, who was among the winners.

The election will not alter the facts on which the judge must decide the case. But if the intelligent design policy is defeated in court, the new school board could refuse to pursue an appeal. It could also withdraw the policy, a step that many challengers said they intended to take.

"We are all for it being discussed, but we do not want to see it in biology class," said Judy McIlvaine, a member of the winning slate. "It is not a science."

The vote counts were close, but of the 16 candidates the one with the fewest votes was Mr. Bonsell, the driving force behind the intelligent design policy. Testimony at the trial revealed that Mr. Bonsell had initially insisted that creationism get equal time in the classroom with evolution. [..]

Congratulations to the Dems for victories in NJ and VA governorships. NJ was not unexpected of course, and I don't think I could have voted for the Republican in Virginia who ran maybe one of the worst campaigns I've seen in awhile.

No real surprise that the initiatives in California lost though I had hoped the conservatives had gained more of a foothold there. I was surprised that the Republican won in New York. Conservative issues held on in Texas and Maine.

All in all a mixed bag of wins and losses, but the Democrats have won the right to gloat a bit.

Hate to put a damper on all the good feelings this post might have generated, but what would the gloating be about? Keeping Democratic governorships in NJ and VA?